Furthermore, there are no confirmed records of a sperm whale or an orca deliberately attacking and killing a human being in order to eat it, whereas Carcharodon has been known, however mistakenly, to make a meal out of the occasional human swimmer, surfer, or spearfisher. The great white generates an atavistic fear in humans no dozen whales come close to matching. The fact that it is also a stealth hunter only adds to the terror it engenders. It is the oceanic equivalent of the clutching hand in a horror movie reaching out from the dark to grab the unsuspecting victim from behind.
As a writer hoping to invent terrifying aliens and ravening otherworldly monsters, I reasoned, it would behoove me to take stock of the nearest actual equivalent the earth has to offer. While it’s easy enough to go to the zoo and observe land-based carnivores, the distancing that results, the presence of moats and heavy bars separating observer from the observed, strongly mitigates against the intensity of the experience. Not to mention the fact that most of the time the imprisoned lions and tigers and bears—oh my—seem utterly disinterested in their eager human visitors. In contrast, I had read that the great white shark tends not to be disinterested in those humans who dare to immerse themselves in its element. Quite the contrary. In January 1991, I set off for the wild coast of South Australia to find out.
At the hotel in Sydney, my fellow expedition members had already begun to arrive. I looked forward to meeting them with more than casual interest, since it was not inconceivable that at some point in the immediate future my continued well-being and/or my life might depend on their respective underwater skills and good judgment.
The first to appear was Brent Mills, youthful scion of a famous family-run portrait photography company based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Brent was open, cheerful, and friendly, like an overgrown Boy Scout who had been blessed with an outsized allowance. His home back in Chattanooga looked like a bombed-out Kodak warehouse, overflowing with more photographic bells, whistles, and gewgaws than I imagine could exist in the feverish dreams of any would-be Ansel Adams.
Next to say hello was Dr. Michael Fritsch of Indianapolis. Mike was quiet, charming, and afflicted with the slightly far-off look of one for whom work is never done. He had, in fact, actually brought with him work to do on the second medical book he was preparing. I would have had someone to discuss writing with, if not for the fact that half the contents were probably in Latin and far beyond my layman’s ken. Considering that he was far from pushing forty, I was much impressed with what he had managed to accomplish in such a short period of time.
Carl Roessler appeared. One of the world’s great underwater photographers, he was a peripatetic, athletic fifty-seven-year-old brimming with the energy and enthusiasm of a man doing exactly what he wanted to do in life. He had the demeanor and face of a mischievous imp and the skin tone of a cosseted Irishman. Out on the open water the unforgiving Aussie sun would tend to fry him, and he knew it. Despite the very real risk of skin cancer, he regularly visited equatorial climes in search of new dive sites and better pictures. Such was the dedication of the devoted diver and wizened photographer.
Greg Sindmack was an obstetrician from Riverside, California. If he cared for the newborns he delivered with the same intensity he did his camera gear, then expectant mothers under his supervision had nothing to worry about. He also cussed more than any physician I’d ever met.
While during the short but bouncy flight from Sydney to Adelaide, Greg and I sweated over the state of our camera gear; Carl, Mike, and Brent experienced no such concerns because they sensibly traveled with specialized photo-equipment travel luggage strong enough to stop an antitank missile.
Arriving in Adelaide, we met up with Sebastian Horseley, the last paying member of our expedition. Sebastian was an English artist of unfamiliar reputation and intense iconoclasm. He promptly began hurling questions at everyone with the speed and facility of a ninja flinging throwing stars. Of himself, he said little. In dress, he inclined to black accented by the occasional outrageous T-shirt. Gradually, we winkled out of him the information that he had only just learned to dive during a recent visit to Thailand. This, therefore, was to be only his second experience with scuba. We eyed one another and shrugged. It’s his life.
The charming fishing town of Port Lincoln likes to be known as Tunarama City, after the annual tuna celebration that’s held there every year: a sort of rural piscine Mardi Gras. The bucolic little town of some 12,000 souls is located an hour’s flight west of Adelaide on the opposite side of the vast Spencer Gulf. Beyond Port Lincoln lie only towns barely large enough to rate a mention on a map, and the vast Nullarbor Plain—a perfectly flat, virtually featureless section of the globe that makes the American Great Plains look like Switzerland. The Nullarbor runs all the way across the continent nearly to the shores of the Indian Ocean. We were met at Port Lincoln’s minimalist airport by our host and guide, Rodney Fox, and his strapping son, Andrew.
On December 8, 1963, while competing for his third consecutive title in the Australian National Spearfishing Championships, Rodney Fox was nearly bitten in half by a great white shark. Every rib on the left side of his body was crushed, one tooth pierced his clavicle clean through, and it took 452 stitches to close up the great wound in his side. When he finally arrived at the local hospital, there was so little blood left in his body that his veins would have collapsed, had five more minutes elapsed before transfusions commenced.
Since that near-death encounter, Fox has made the study of the great white his lifework. In the years since the attack, he has guided scientists and researchers, game specialists and professional photographers on regular expeditions to study the most elusive and mesmerizing carnivore in the sea. He’ll even take along the odd, compulsively curious writer.
Rodney turned out to be a tall, soft-spoken chap with a quick smile, thinning hair, and a perpetual twinkle in his eye. He looked like the staff member Kris Kringle would have had to keep putting on administrative leave for playing too many practical jokes on the other elves. Having collaborated on this trip many times previously, he and Carl immediately began swapping jokes and greetings and old stories. Son Andrew proved to be much quieter, almost shy, and bigger, with the stalwart build of a football lineman.
Accompanying them was Jack Bellamy, who would comprise one-third of our ship’s crew. The blue-collar third. The one who does the dirty work. He was tall, limber, and bore a perfectly uncanny resemblance to a certain mythical sailor inordinately fond of spinach, except he had no pipe clenched between his teeth. His strine (Aussie dialect) was thicker than that of a beer-soaked koala. The rest of us nonetheless managed communication without benefit of a translator.
The picturesque Port Lincoln harbor was home to a number of pleasure craft and numerous hardworking fishing boats. Since the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese had joined the locals in seriously depleting the area’s tuna, these boats had turned to catching shrimp and other fish. Abalone and crayfish (or crays, a kind of slipper lobster) are also profitably taken in the nearby waters.
Far from being a luxury vessel, the boat for our expedition, the Nenad, was a working shrimper, identical to the craft you see in those oversize photos that decorate the walls of every Red Lobster restaurant. Two shark cages secured atop an open platform above the rear deck constituted exceptions to the typical shrimping gear. One was fashioned from aluminum, the other steel. Each was about six feet square by seven tall, with twin cylindrical metal float tanks welded to the top and a horizontal camera port encircling the entire cage at shoulder level. This unbarred opening was at least a foot high. Everyone’s silent gaze was drawn immediately to the place where there were no protective bars. The gap looked bigger than I imagined it might be.
Joining up with us in Port Lincoln along with Sebastian Horseley were Klaus and Renate Reith from Stuttgart, a delightful couple in their mid-thirties who made their living as professional photographers and multimedia show presenters. Their arrival led to an entirely unforeseen difficul
ty. It seems they had brought their daughter along with them. This, in itself, was not a problem. The problem arose from the fact that their daughter was . . . five.
Presented with this potential fait accompli, a clearly troubled Carl and Rodney caucused. They then asked the opinion of the rest of us. We eyed one another uneasily. The gist of our conclusion was that what to do and how to proceed was not for us to say. I mumbled something about adequate insurance. Someone made the inevitable unseemly joke about five-year-olds being just the right size to serve as shark bait.
The Reiths had traveled farther and spent more than anyone else in order to participate in the expedition. Bearing this in mind, everyone reluctantly swallowed their concerns and agreed they could come along.
As we started to load the Nenad, out of dark depths redolent not of orcs but of prawns burst an Australian-Slav hobbit named Mateo Ricov. Swarthy, ebullient Captain Ricov looked exactly like one of the Greek resistance fighters from The Guns of Navarone. I peered past him, but Anthony Quinn and Gregory Peck were nowhere to be seen. As we prepared to depart, Mateo was everywhere, loudly and enthusiastically attending to last-minute details.
Also making an appearance at this time was Silvy Slausen, our cook. In her early twenties, affable and attractive, she was to be one of only two women on board a small boat for eight days with twelve men. I could not but admire her self-assurance. The bachelors among us admired her even more, until everyone was tactfully but in no uncertain terms informed that she was the fiancée of the very large and perhaps not altogether shy Andrew Fox.
After much picture taking, the Nenad’s sturdy diesels were fired up and we headed out to sea.
A pounding, rolling, all-day journey found us approximately a hundred miles from the mainland, rocking in the lee of the small, isolated, and uninhabited North Neptune Islands. Once clear of Port Lincoln, we sighted not a single other craft, not even on the Nenad’s radar. We were bobbing in the body of cold water known as the Great Australian Bight, and the next substantial chunk of dry land due south of our position was Antarctica. The weather was windy, overcast, and cold, most unusual for this part of the world in mid-January. Knowing it was exceptional was small consolation to those of us who had traveled halfway around the world in hopes of clear skies and warm sunshine.
Despite the stabilizers that had been added for the benefit of visiting landlubbers like ourselves, the Nenad bobbed and weaved like Lee Marvin’s horse in Cat Ballou. Dr. Fritsch was immediately seasick, and would remain wretchedly so for the majority of the voyage. He spent a great deal of time in his bunk, stomaching (if one dare visualize) his unhappy situation in stoic silence. Others endured the rough conditions to greater or lesser degree. Renate Reith endured the discomfort in despondent German. My knowledge of the language not being up to fully comprehending the full extent of her suffering, the perfectly bilingual Fritsch helpfully translated the details of her ongoing misery for the rest of us.
Soothing our souls as well as our stomachs, Silvy extracted gourmet meals from hidden closets and drawers. She appeared to use recipes, but I’m convinced magic was involved. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the non-sufferers among us wolfed down these wondrous meals three times a day. A huge cooler designed to hold ice to preserve the regular shrimp catch overflowed with iced sodas and beer. As the only teetotaler aboard, the others were delighted by my disinterest, which left that much more XXXX and Foster’s Lager for them. Alas, there was nothing comparable in consumables for which to trade my allotted ration of grog.
The North Neptune Islands consist of several small, craggy, granitic scabs protruding not far above the chilly waves. Like most of the islands out in the bight, they are barren and seldom visited. The larger of the two provided some shelter for our rocking craft as well as a safe haven for an assortment of wandering seabirds, determined low scrub, and hundreds if not thousands of barking, moaning, wheezing, bellowing, stinking New Zealand fur seals. It was the calving season, and the great slick wet arc of black boulder-strewn shoreline was a jumbled rookery crammed with squalling pups the size of overfed poodles.
We went ashore to photograph and observe, able to approach the unconcerned and rarely visited animals to within touching distance, discovering that the pups will nip at your fingers if you’re not careful. They are utterly captivating little critters. Their presence in considerable numbers was also the reason the Nenad had anchored offshore their nursery.
Pinnipeds are the great white’s favorite prey, and the younger and less experienced, the easier they are to catch. This feeding preference holds true wherever great whites are to be found, from Australia to South Africa to the shores of central California.
Back on board, Rodney, Jack Bellamy, and Andrew were busily dishing out the chum. Consisting of blood, fish oil, and fish parts, the chum, or shark lure, was compiled according to a special recipe of Rodney’s own devising. I expected the gory concoction to reek to high heaven, but, oddly, it hardly smelled at all. This lack of pungency might have been a side benefit of the cool weather. Ladled or hosed overboard, the dark slick was swiftly carried out to the open sea by the steady current. The reaction a shark has to crossing a chum line approximates that of a blond forty-year-old multiple divorcée encountering the naive male heir to a modest fortune. It garners immediate attention.
But great whites are wary, unpredictable creatures. The pre-expedition literature repeatedly warned that despite the crew’s best efforts to attract them, it was entirely possible we might not encounter any at all. In 1990, six of the expedition’s allotted eight days elapsed before a single shark put in an appearance, and only two sharks were seen altogether.
Chaining our impatience, we settled down to wait. The literature and Carl’s judicious admonitions prepared us. We had books, games, diving and photographic equipment to see to, in addition to well-packed layers of patience. We were quite prepared to linger at the site for as long as it might take our quarry to arrive.
Exactly one hour and forty-five minutes after dropping anchor, Captain Ricov was heard singing out, “Shark!”
There ensued a mad scramble to vacate our constipated below-deck quarters the likes of which I have not experienced since I was in the army and it was announced that the mess hall that night was serving steak. Everyone rushed—no, rocketed—to the Nenad’s stern.
In the dark green-black water astern, two fins. The mind registers, evaluates, then corrects. No. One fin, one tail, both belonging to the same impossibly large fish. We gawked, entranced, at the water as though a vision from the Cretaceous had magically appeared before us. We were not far wrong.
Advancing with effortless, leisurely sweeps of its huge scythelike tail, the great white slipped casually through the chum to pass with utter indifference less than a yard from the stern. As it did so, it rolled onto its left side to eye us. That pupilless jet-black eye is like nothing else I have seen in Nature. As the shark opened its mouth, we were permitted a glimpse of dentition, a flash of pure white enamel whose individual components were triangular in shape and serrated like steak knives.
The shark dropped out of sight, and we discovered that we had all been holding our breath. A few moments later, it returned and began to circle the boat. It was a youngster, not very big, perhaps only nine feet long and weighing mere hundreds of pounds.
Andrew, Rodney, and Jack were in motion, setting out half tunas or mackerels secured to the ends of thin lines. These bleeding baits were put out to lure the shark in and keep it intrigued. To prevent the chunks of fish from sinking, ordinary colored balloons were attached to the bait lines. Bobbing up and down on the surface of a glassy and suddenly threatening sea, the cheap, brightly hued inflatable spheres were an incongruous sight in view of what was lurking in the water just beneath them.
Rodney informed us that the shark must take the bait or it would quickly lose interest and swim off. We waited and stared. Time passed—too much time.
Then a fin cut close, cut away, returned. A pointed nose mome
ntarily cleaved the water, and the drifting hunk of fish vanished, the tough bait line snipped as easily as by scissors. Andrew hauled it in, its balloon float still attached and unharmed.
An hour later, a second shark appeared and took some bait. Carl was ecstatic, disbelieving. Two sharks the first day, almost within an hour of anchoring! Unbelievable. Rodney nodded, turned to us, and smiled.
“Anyone for a swim?”
That is what I traveled 8,000 miles for. That is why I’ve read science fiction since I was ten years old. The great shark is Van Vogt and Heinlein and Clarke become reality. It’s Sheckley and Russell and Vance. But it is not fiction, not words on paper. The fantastic has been made flesh and given mass and color and alien patterns of its own.
In minutes, I had donned my heavy neoprene wet suit. Because the cages float on the surface, we would be working and observing in only eight feet of water. In full cold-water suit, that meant forty pounds of lead on the weight belt secured around my waist, or else I’d float to the top of the cage and bob up and down as helpless as an unpowered blimp. Between the weights and the tank on my back, I felt about as agile as a ruptured hippo. Trying to maintain my balance, I lurched toward the stern, staggering like Kharis the mummy.
The open top of the cage gaped invitingly. Hanging tightly to the gunwale, I stepped over the stern and pivoted laboriously. At that point, I found myself standing on the slippery eighteen-inch-wide diving platform that had been crudely fashioned from welded-together one-inch-diameter steel pipes. Cold water lapped over my feet and booties. (There is no need for fins within a shark cage.) With disconcerting irregularity, the swells caused the stern to dip down, the cage to surge up, and vice versa, never in tandem. If I mistimed my jump into the cage, I could hit the metal bars and break something—or miss it altogether. I looked around, my peripheral vision severely constrained by my mask. Where were the sharks? Were they watching me? Was I their fiction made real?